New Restaurants and Openings on Jacksonville's Northside

If you live off Dunn Avenue or anywhere near the I-95 spine north of the airport, the last twelve months quietly rewrote your errand map. A shopping center that used to send you across the river for a specialty run now has the specialty run. A soul food kitchen that used to live on Edgewood opened a second dining room on Soutel. And the corner at Dunn and I-95, long defined by the interstate ramp, added a building that a local franchisee spent three quarters of a million dollars to put there.

This post is not a "moving to the Northside" pitch. It is a snapshot of what your neighbors are actually opening, permitting, and lining up for, from Oceanway down to Sherwood.

The short version of what changed

For years the Northside's retail story was told through Walmart, Lowe's, and BJ's. That is still the anchor story, but the more interesting one is happening in the second tier of tenants: owner-operated restaurants, specialty retailers, and infill on parcels that had been vacant since the pandemic. The center of gravity is not one project. It is a corridor mix.

Each of those is a data point. Together they are a pattern.

Dunn Avenue is being underwritten by people who already live here

The new Zaxbys at 818 Dunn Ave., just west of I-95, opened its doors the morning of July 22, 2026. That is a fact worth pausing on. The 2,870-square-foot building was constructed from the ground up at a permit-estimated cost of $750,000, and it is the 26th Zaxbys in Northeast Florida. What matters locally is not the chain. It is the ownership. Franchisees John Roberts and Chris English have run the Airport Road Zaxbys for more than 20 years, and the Dunn Avenue store is their second Northside location. The opening was tied to the launch of the Jacksonville Jumpstart to Prosperity Initiative, a civic effort focused on Northside entrepreneurship, workforce development, and early childhood education, coordinated through the Miriam R. Cuff Innovation Center and funded by donations from NASEMBA members to the Cora Lee Cuff Fund.

The restaurant is projected to add roughly 50 jobs to the Dunn Avenue corridor. Hours run to midnight Sunday through Wednesday and to 2 a.m. Thursday through Saturday, which is a different signal than most fast-casual openings send. It is a bet that Dunn Avenue has enough late foot traffic to justify a late-night kitchen.

River City Marketplace is quietly re-tenanting

The Marketplace opened in November 2006 as the largest shopping center on the Northside and the only one of its size north of the St. Johns River. It carried an original slate of anchors that included Walmart, Lowe's, and a 14-screen Regal Cinemas. The Regal closed in August 2022 and was demolished in December of that year to make room for BJ's Wholesale. Kimco Realty completed its acquisition of the center in January 2024, and the leasing plan has been visibly active since.

Three tenant moves tell the current story.

Total Wine & More opened at 13275 City Square Drive in November 2025, taking over the 20,000-square-foot OfficeMax that had closed on March 22 of that year. The build-out cost about $1.7 million. This is the first new Total Wine in North Florida in close to two decades, and the store carries roughly 8,000 wines, 4,500 spirits, and 2,500 beers, with a walk-in humidor and an in-store classroom for tastings and events. Before this, Northside residents drove to St. Johns Town Center for that inventory.

Keke's Breakfast Cafe filed a permit in March 2026 to renovate 4,925 square feet at 840 Nautica Drive at a project cost of $245,000. It will be Keke's seventh Northeast Florida location and its first on the Northside, franchised by AM Eatery River City LLC under John C. Metz. The chain runs a 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily schedule, which is a category the Marketplace has not really served.

Crazy Pita, a fast-casual Mediterranean concept, was announced for 13227 City Square Drive next to the Northside Walmart with a target February opening, part of a small three-store Duval rollout.

The through-line is that Kimco is not backfilling the center with more of the same. It is filling it with categories the Northside used to leave the zip code to find: a superstore alcohol retailer, a sit-down breakfast chain, a fast-casual Mediterranean.

Sherwood Town Center and the Soutel corridor

South of the airport, the story is quieter and more personal. On March 11, 2026, Clifford and Ruth Daniels opened the second Annie Ru's Carryout and Catering at 5045 Soutel Drive, Suite 18, in Sherwood Town Center. The center is well-worn. Its only major chain tenant is a Domino's. The rest is a mix of an industrial training facility, the Al Amir Islamic Center, a nursing academy, and small locally owned storefronts.

Ruth Daniels started the brand as a catering company in 2008 on Hendricks Avenue and grew it into a full restaurant at 2851 Edgewood Ave. N., which still operates. When she picked Soutel for her second dining room, her framing was direct.

"I wanted to bring something with a nice atmosphere to the Northside of Jacksonville."

The menu is Southern soul food. The house specialty is her mother Annie Lee Hayward's mac and cheese. Hours run 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, with breakfast on the menu again after the Edgewood location dropped its morning service during the pandemic.

The Daniels' opening is a small dot on a permit map. It is also the kind of independent, owner-financed food business that indicates a corridor is being taken seriously by the people who live around it.

The infrastructure keeps showing up in the permit log

Non-retail investment is following the same pattern. On June 29, 2026, the city issued a permit for a new 8,158-square-foot Dialysis Clinic Inc. building at 590 Dundas Drive at a project cost of $3.5 million, along with an iONNA EV charging facility on Cahoon Road. Neither will trend on social. Both are what a stabilizing submarket looks like on paper.

A Northside Saturday you could not have run in 2023

Put the pieces together and the itinerary writes itself.

• Breakfast at the Edgewood Annie Ru's until Keke's opens at River City Marketplace, then swap it in for a closer sit-down option.
• Errands at BJ's Wholesale in the former Regal Cinemas footprint.
• Specialty wine or a tasting class at Total Wine at 13275 City Square Drive instead of driving to Town Center.
• Lunch pivot to Crazy Pita once it opens next to Walmart, or a late shift down to the new Zaxbys at 818 Dunn Ave.
• Afternoon at Oceanway Park at 12215 Sago Ave. W. for the pool, dog park, and shoreline launch.

None of those stops are new to the map of Jacksonville. Almost all of them are new to a map that stays north of the St. Johns River.

Why any of this matters if you already own here

The retail base a neighborhood has today is the strongest indicator of the retail base it will have five years from now, because tenants are more likely to sign near proven traffic than to gamble on unproven parcels. The Marketplace is signing category-leaders. The Dunn Avenue corridor is drawing repeat operators. The Soutel corridor is drawing independent owners who could have picked anywhere else in the city and chose to plant a second location here. That is the story a homeowner should read into the last twelve months of openings, and it is the story generic guides written from the outside will not tell you.

If you want to talk through what the changing tenant mix means for a specific street, a specific block, or a home you already own on the Northside, Plenti Realty is glad to have that conversation. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you are ready to see the number behind the neighborhood you already know.